Shooters Preview 2005 (part two)

Sam peers at FEAR, Pariah, Snowblind and more...

More Images

Okay, here's part two of Ferrago's run down of the most promising shooters waiting to blast their way onto gaming machines this year.

Pariah (Also on Xbox)

Considering the pedigree of the developers, (creators of Unreal and Unreal Tournament) there's been a noticeable absence of overblown hype about Pariah that usually accompanies the production of an FPS. Or maybe it is because of their status as creators of some of the biggest and best FPS titles which liberates them from the messy activities that other games must engage in to help them get noticed in this most crowded of genres. But then, thinking of the hype surrounding DOOM 3 and the Gordon Freeman Experience... okay, I've confused myself now. Which should hopefully not be a problem for players of this sumptuous looking shooter.

Digital Extremes seem to be taking a comprehensive look at the entire gaming experience. Proper Hollywood script writers have been hired to come up with the story, so hopefully the central character will be free from any form of amnesia. The plot is centred around your character, burnt-out doctor Jack Mason who is escorting a prisoner infected with a mysterious virus. Unsurprisingly their transport crashes onto a less-than hospitable prison planet. To make matters worse, in 16 hours the military is going to nuke the entire problematic planet from orbit. It is the only way to be sure, after all. The player has to get Jack and his charge through the 18 levels of the game before the clock runs out.

The actual gameplay is reported to concentrate on all-out gunplay. Taking its queue from Deus Ex, each weapon can be upgraded three times, transforming a puny pea-shooter into a flaming cannon of death. The health system emulates Halo 2 with death being avoidable if you can find somewhere safe to rest and regenerate. Quite how much your prisoner charge will feature in the gameplay is unknown, so we can only hope that whenever she is about she doesn't become a hindrance. While there's little info on the makeup of the multiplayer game-modes, Pariah does have one real ace up its sleeve. The Xbox version will ship with a multiplayer level editor and will support custom levels from the day of release. This could be a revolutionary development in online console gaming, as long as the editor software itself is easy enough to use.

Pariah looks set to combine many of the finest elements of some of the finest games of recent years. Under the steady hand of Digital Extremes and with a visual style sure to win hearts, Pariah could find itself becoming very welcome indeed around the time of its spring release.

F.E.A.R.

What would happen if you took the coding talents of Monolith, added in some Asian-style horror and a measure of frantic gunplay? Well you would have a dose of F.E.A.R. While the plot is under wraps tighter than a Scotsman 50p short of a bottle of Buckfast, the hype machine has churned out one or two small details. The player will be cast in the role of an agent of F.E.A.R., a special forces unit that focuses on the kind of missions that have the icy touch of the paranormal about them. The game begins with the F.E.A.R. team investigating a grisly massacre of another spec-ops squad at an aerospace factory. Communication with this first party was lost right after insertion and during the intervening time the entire squad was literally torn to pieces. It is the F.E.A.R. team's responsibility to go into the factory and eliminate whatever threat happens to be lurking there. Not a job you'd catch me doing in a million years, so thank god for computers and their ability to simulate things none of us would ever have the balls to do in real life. (Although I have still to get to grips with any form of personal finance software; there are some things too scary that even the remove of silicon cannot vanquish the terror).

Screenshots of the game aren't all that promising, with some bland texturing and low polygon counts in the environments. But once you see it moving with all the particle effects blazing away you begin to appreciate that F.E.A.R. will be a visceral experience. With sparks, glass, concrete and all other kinds of shrapnel and material spinning around, the firefights look like being visually arresting affairs. If the AI can match the complexity of the action on screen then FPS fans should add this to their must-have lists. Yet F.E.A.R. is about more then all out gunplay.

F.E.A.R. will combine the kind of frantic squad-based firefights that have reinvigorated the FPS genre with the kind of scares and frights which normally find their home on console shockers like Silent Hill. In between developing creative games like Shogo and Tron 2.0, Monolith made what is generally regarded as one of the scariest titles to yet grace the PC, Aliens vs. Predator 2. So their ability to instil fear in gamers is well known, so with luck the horror aspect of F.E.A.R. will be an integral part of the gameplay experience as opposed to something which crops up in the occasional in-engine cutscene. The PC is crying out for more chilling games, and when you view the intensity of the action in the few videos which have been released it's hard not to have high hopes for F.E.A.R. If everything stays on track, plan on having the crap scared out of you this summer.